


The Shape of His Soul in His Hands

by MeteorAtDusk



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Animal Transformation, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 07:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16300793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeteorAtDusk/pseuds/MeteorAtDusk
Summary: "I just… I wondered what kind of person your soulmate would be, that’s all, since I’ve never met them.”Reborn studied him for a moment, and then smirked.“You have met him,” he said.In which the Arcobaleno's animal companions were not always animals, but instead were their soulmates, cursed alongside them.





	The Shape of His Soul in His Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I... don't really know where this came from. I've never written for this fandom before, and haven't written fanfiction at all in at least a year, so I was pretty surprised when I was inspired (?) to write this weird thing instead of sleeping or doing actual work. Nevertheless, I hope someone out there enjoys it!  
> This mostly follows anime canon (because I've watched the show a lot more recently) with some references to events that happened after the anime ended, and those won't necessarily have gone quite the same way. Also I have SO many more random ideas about this universe and what happens after the fic ends that never made it in, mostly because they didn't fit the tone at all, and I have no idea what to do with them.
> 
> (Note: I labeled this as Gen, because I never explicitly say exactly what the nature of Reborn and Leon's relationship pre-curse was. There's more than one kind of soulmate in this verse, so it's up to interpretation; if you want to read it as romantic, that's fine too!)

 

 

“Hey, have you ever met your soulmate, Reborn?”

Tsunayoshi blinked at him with big brown eyes, his health homework spread out on his bed.  The brightly colored booklet was only turned to the second page, his student ignoring the jaunty, colorful lettering trying so fervently to teach him about _Types of Bonds: Sexual, Romantic, Platonic_ in favor of satisfying his own idle curiosity.

Reborn kicked him.

“Finish your homework, Dame-Tsuna,” he said when the startled shriek had died down.  “A mafia boss doesn’t ask questions with obvious answers.”

“Owwwww,” Tsuna grumbled, rubbing his head and blinking.  “Wait… does that mean you have?”

Reborn looked at him.

“Of course,” he said.  “I’m the World’s Greatest Hitman.”

“That has literally nothing to do with this,” Tsuna muttered under his breath, shrieking again when Reborn readied his foot for another strike at his fluff-stuffed head.  “Hiie!  I just… I wondered what kind of person your soulmate would be, that’s all, since I’ve never met them.”

Reborn studied him for a moment, and then smirked.

“You _have_ met him,” he said.

“Eh?  I have?” Tsuna looked absolutely perplexed.  “When? You never said anything!  Who was it?”

Reborn gave him a kittenish smile.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said in his cutest, most babyish voice.  “It’s Leon.”

Tsuna blinked at him, rolled his eyes, and went back to his work with a sigh.

On the brim of Reborn’s fedora, Leon watched with bright orange eyes, and made no comment.

 

*

 

Reborn was a master of disguise.  Yes, he sometimes indulged in outrageous cosplay, prompting some genuinely hilarious reactions from his students, but he knew how to stay unseen, how to hide, and how to redirect.  He was well aware of the most basic tenet of going undetected: the best place to hide something is in plain sight.

No one questioned the bond between a man and his pet.  In the same vein, no one thought twice about the fact that an animal that kept company with an Arcobaleno might be unusual.  The Arcobaleno themselves were as mysterious as they were powerful.  Of course their companions were extraordinary.  No one really knew how or why the world’s strongest babies existed in the first place, so what was one more oddity?

The secret of the Strongest Seven’s animal companions was as ancient as the curse itself, and guarded more closely than any other, each of them too wary of what could happen if even a hint of it made its way to the mafia, or the triads, to anyone at all who would take advantage of the knowledge.  It was never pleasant to know that you had a weakness, but better than not knowing at all.

Better than not knowing what you needed to protect.

They gave them new names, of course, with their consent.  Each of the Arcobaleno knew better than to leave an obvious trail.  They carried them away as they settled into their new bodies, tiny and so unfamiliar, scattering to the corners of the Earth as they tried to process the change, tried to understand their fate and their curse, tried to hold back the rage and the guilt in order to focus on the one thing that mattered most.

Reborn settled his on the brim of his hat.  He called him Leon, an obvious reference to the little lizard’s species, barely a name at all.

Leon made no objection.  He only crawled down to rest on Reborn’s shoulder, and curled his tail lightly around the baby’s small neck, a collar of green scales around his throat, a tether to their new reality.

 

*

 

It had been a long time since Reborn had spoken Leon’s real name.

It had been a long time since Reborn had heard his own name on his soulmate’s lips, slipping out with a laugh or a sigh, a crinkle at the corner of amber eyes following an indulgent look, a pleased chuckle, a quiet hum of happiness.

It had been a long time.

 

*

 

_“What do you think?”_

_Reborn stood on the wall and watched his student make his way towards school.  He started the tally in his head; no athletic ability, little interest in academics, no friends to speak of, resigned to being as “dame” as his peers insisted he was._

_Reborn had his work cut out for him.  He smirked.  Good.  He liked the challenge, and it was sure to be entertaining._

_Settled on his shoulder, Leon watched too._

_Warmth pulsed in the space behind his ribs, the bond beating in time with his heart, the only thing between them that had never changed.  Reborn didn’t allow himself to even twitch as he untangled the thread of foreign emotions, so much simpler than they should be but just as keenly felt as ever.  He kept still as he mulled them over, looking to the outside world like someone musing idly to himself and nothing more._

_Interest.  Curiosity._ Anticipation.

_“Hmm,” Reborn hummed.  “You think he has that much potential?”_

_The warmth in his chest hummed with him, and it was overwhelmingly_ fond.

_Reborn chuckled._

_“Already?” he said, and the fondness nestled under his heart and grew between them, echoing in the empty space that two halves of a whole could never quite breach.  “You get attached so easily.”_

_Leon turned vivid orange eyes on him, then crawled down his arm and transformed into his second favorite shape: a small green gun.  The weight of him was familiar in Reborn’s hand, and perfectly right, like a puzzle piece snapping into place, a part of his soul as quick and deadly as he was._

_He tipped his head forward, his fedora shading his eyes, and he smiled._

_“Showtime,” he said, with a certain amount of unholy glee._

_In the space between them, he could feel the rhythm of warm laughter._

 

*

 

Leon was an excellent judge of character.  He was better even than Reborn.  He could look at a person and simply know if they were trustworthy, if they were worth his time and his patience and his love.  Even when they weren’t, most of the time he would offer himself anyway, but he never seemed surprised when things went wrong.  There was just something in him that made him want to try regardless.

Reborn had long suspected that Leon was a latent Sky.  He couldn’t be sure, of course.  Leon had never been active, and Reborn wasn’t going to endanger his partner just to answer a question, however much he burned with curiosity.  If nothing else, attracting the attention of the underworld to his soulmate was an idea that made his teeth grind and his fingers itch for a trigger.  Skies were in high demand, after all.  Better to keep that suspicion tucked away.

So he had never satisfied his curiosity on that score.

Looking at him now, though, staring into bright orange reptilian eyes, it was hard to see anything but _fire_ , and _will_ , and _Harmony._

 

*

 

_It was no surprise, really, that Leon turned out to be the most extraordinary of all of them._

_They all had their little gifts, of course.  The newly dubbed Fantasma could disguise herself as a frog, and granted Viper a hovering flight.  Lichi was as fast as the wind, outpacing even Fon, and Oodako could grow or shrink in size and seemed to share a particularly tight bond with the Cloud Arcobaleno, reading his every movement and responding in kind.  No one was entirely sure what Keiman was capable of, but Verde’s smirk was enough to keep anyone from poking at him too much, and Cosmo had the same ageless, knowing eyes that Luce saw the world with._

_Falco could actually pick Colonnello up by his collar and carry him away, and Reborn made a few pointed comments about how much that said about their relationship.  Colonnello spluttered, his cheeks adorably pink on his baby face, but Falco certainly looked amused, or at least as much as a bird could.  Carrying all the weight indeed, Reborn thought, as the others laughed at the two best friends._

_No one asked about the absence around Lal.  It was never a polite thing to mention a soulmate’s passing.  Even they could respect that._

_Leon shimmered and the vivid green kendama in Reborn’s hand transformed back into a chameleon with bright eyes and an impish smile._

_“He can change shape?” Verde asked, adjusting his glasses in a way that made the light flash off the lenses.  Reborn held his hand up to his hat, and Leon went back to his customary perch._

_“What other things can he turn into?” Luce asked, Cosmo scampering up to sit on her hat as well, leaning forward to get a better look at the lizard._

_Reborn smirked._

_“Anything I want,” he said smugly.  “Guns, hammers, knives, even a functional parachute.  We haven’t found anything yet that he can’t take the shape of.”_

_“That is_ so _unfair,” Skull whined.  Reborn gave him a look and he squeaked.  “I-I mean that’s perfectly fitting for the soulmate of someone so… err, so awesome as yourself, Reborn.  …Sir.”_

_Reborn smirked again, and drank in the praise, insincere as it was.  Leon_ was _amazing._

_His soulmate had always been everything—the only thing—he needed._

 

*

 

The future was a place full of death and deceit and destruction.  Even the air was a choking poison, each breath harder than the last as it bore down, made its way into his lungs and his veins and tried to smother him like a sputtering candle flame.  It couldn’t succeed, because he wasn’t a useless candle guttering in the winds of change, he was a Sun, the _strongest_ Sun, and he burned bright and hot for as long as he had a reason, a will, a _regret_.

Leon was with him.  The warmth in his chest flickered with pain, and he would not, _could not_ let it burn out.

So he burned, and they lived, and they made it to safety.

He needed a special suit just to survive, to protect him from the sickening radiation that still felt heavy in his toes and his fingernails.  He wore it, because it kept him safe, and in keeping him safe it kept the other half of his soul out of danger.

The future was a place of fear and grief, and he would not add this to it, not now, not ever.

And then Tsuna was there, and Gokudera, Yamamoto, Lambo, Kyoko and Haru, and all of the Vongola’s tenth generation.  And he needed to teach them to survive in this time, and he needed to teach them to save the future, save the world, _save themselves._

His flames were encased in a plastic bubble, locked away inside the pacifier, and the world itself was trying to kill him.

Reborn got to work.

It would be alright.  Leon was with him, and they were an unbeatable team.

The future would be fine.

 

*

_No one wanted to talk about it, but Reborn could tell that all of them had noticed.  The knowledge was reflected in soft strokes over fur or scales, affection woven with worry into a material that sat across their shoulders like a cape made of lead, guilt that lurked in their eyes even as they tried to mask it._

_It was only the first time they had met up since they were cursed, but it only took a glance to see that the situation was the same for all of them._

_Their bonds remained intact.  The shift and flicker of foreign emotions behind his breastbone still warmed him from the inside, and Reborn knew, in his mind and his heart and his soul that the person on the other side of that tether was the same fire, the same will, as before.  The warmth in the space between them burned with the same depth, the same character.  It was the_ scope _of those feelings that felt… lessened.  Muted.  It was the breathtaking complexity he had grown so used to that was suddenly missing._

_Skull, predictably, was the one who brought it up in the end.  He bumbled through the question with an octopus clutched tightly in his hands, tentacles wrapped around his fingers, with no thought to the vulnerability he was showing them, the fool.  The rest of them refused to react much outwardly, even as the air shifted and the focus of every one of them sharpened to a knife point.  Luce’s hand strayed to pet Cosmo’s fluffy tail, Lal throwing a tense look towards Colonnello.  Reborn felt the weight of the chameleon on the brim of his fedora, and didn’t move at all._

_Verde adjusted his glasses and told them in his clinical, detached way about animal brains versus human, the complexity of intelligence, and the wide variety of shapes their soulmates had been trapped in.  How in accommodating their new bodies some things may, inevitably, have been lost in translation.  The Arcobaleno listened silently, and no one asked the obvious follow-up._

_They knew too well that sometimes things that had been lost could not be regained.  Similarly, there were some questions that shouldn’t be asked when you knew the answers would destroy you.  Reborn knew it as well as anyone.  You made do with what you had, and moved forward._

_Leon’s tiny shape was far too small to feel heavy on his hat, on his heart._

_He felt it anyway._

*

 

The Vindice had no companions.  They were dead men walking, corpses kept in motion by their hatred and bitterness.  They had lost sight of anything else the world had to offer.

There was only so much you could expect, when they had purposefully abandoned half of their souls in order to seek their revenge.

Death would be kinder.

 

*

 

_Leon always went above and beyond for Reborn’s students.  He cared about them, and unlike the Sun Arcobaleno, he had no qualms about showing it._

_“You’ll wear yourself out like this,” Reborn told the exhausted lizard, eyeing the chameleon’s delicate ribs, stark and obvious under his drawn skin._

_Leon blinked at him tiredly, and crawled slowly into his proffered hand, curling up and falling asleep almost instantly._

_Reborn huffed a quiet sigh, and shook his head._

_“I’ll make sure he knows to thank you,” he murmured._

_In the space under his heart lay gratitude, and contentment, and for once he wasn’t sure whether or not it came from him._

 

*

 

When the curse was finally broken there were not eight stunned, breathless human beings who had been given back their futures, but _fourteen_.

Tsuna gaped at the almost doubled numbers, at the strangers sitting around them in clusters of two, each of them paired with a former Arcobaleno.  His eyes skated to the one by Reborn, a slow smile spreading across the stranger’s face as Tsuna’s tutor stared at him with an emotion no one quite dared to label.

There was something about that smile that seemed familiar to Tsuna, for all that he had never seen this person in his life.

“ _Leon?_ ” he asked, stunned.

Reborn sat down hard, still staring.

The stranger turned to him with a grin, and as a clamor went up among the others, cries and cheers and joyful words rising to the sky, he threw himself back on the grass and laughed and laughed and _laughed_.

And Reborn smiled.

 

*

 

_“Why?!” they asked and_

_“How?” they asked and_

_“How_ could you? _They had nothing to do with this!”_

_He wasn’t really listening, too busy staring at the tiny creature that lay trembling, confused and afraid, at his feet._

_“They have everything to do with this,” the Man with the Iron Hat told them dispassionately.  “They are each a half of your souls, and so they feed your flames.  Without them you would not be enough to sustain the pacifiers.  They, like you, need to be transformed in order for the flame transference to be most effective.  You should be pleased that they have been given shapes that will be more useful to you while you uphold the balance of the world.”_

_It was a chameleon, small and green, with bright orange eyes that felt so, so familiar._

_“Pleased?  Pleased?!  You utter_ bastard!”

_There was a fluttering inside his chest, just under his heart in a place held sacred.  He knew that feeling, that warmth.  It might be the only part of himself that he still recognized.  It flickered like a flame in a cold wind, tremulous and unsure._

_“How can you possibly think we would just accept this you—”_

_“Everyone, please, I know this is upsetting, but there was no other way—”_

_“Don’t you_ dare, _Luce,_ _don’t you—you knew about this and you—how could you just sit by and_ let this happen?!  _Your own…!”_

_Gently, with pudgy fingers he barely acknowledged as his own, he scooped the little lizard into his hands.  Cupping his palms around it, he brought the creature close to his face and looked into its vivid, hesitant eyes._

_Orange met black, and in that place behind his heart the fire wavered, steadied, and burned bright once again.  Ignoring the raging argument around him, he stood on small, wobbly legs.  Cradling his soulmate to his chest, he turned and wordlessly began the trek down the mountain._

_In the space between them, there was warmth._

*

 

The future would be fine.

Leon was with him.

 


End file.
